Why you should keep making your morning coffee (or whatever else you do every day) if you want to be creatively successful

I’ve been coming downstairs and making a morning coffee in my little stove-top espresso maker for as long as I’ve lived in this house. Longer. That’s more than a decade of morning coffee making.

A daily ritual

Over the years the coffee maker has changed a couple of times, and for a while I used decaffeinated coffee rather than the lovely full buzz blend I use today, but the basic ritual has been the same:

I come downstairs, fill the pot with water and coffee, place it on the hob and wait for the dark liquid to start noisily bubbling through, filling the kitchen with that wonderful freshly brewed coffee smell. I reach for my favourite cup (that’s probably changed a few times over the years too) and pour out my start to the day.

Why am I going on about coffee you might ask. Moreover, what in the world has that go to do with being creative?

Why habits keep us creative

It’s not my coffee making habit per se that I think is important, rather it’s the regular ritual, a ritual that stretches back through my life, that I believe helps me stay on my creative path.

Creativity like anything else we want to succeed at needs to be a habit, and habits need rituals, and rituals by their nature need to be repetitive (and preferably easily performed). My morning coffee making is a perfect ritual, it is repetitive, simple and can be done in my semi-awake morning state. Once done, I am little more awake thanks to the caffeine (!), but more importantly I’m firmly anchored in my day and ready to get on with my Important Work.

What daily habits do you have (or could you start) to keep you on your creative track?

Elsewhere

<ul>

Twyla Tharp talks a lot about the importance of habits in maintaining our creative lives in her excellent The Creative Habit.

<li>I talked a little about creative rituals and Twyla's book in <a href="http://podcasts.sustainablycreative.net/micropodcast-4/">this microPodcast</a>.</li></ul>

In my next blog post I’m going to talk about why I think it’s important to stay steadfast to a creative idea or creative practice, rather than keep trying something new. If you don’t want to miss the post why not subscribe to Sustainably Creative’s RSS feed, or email updates.